Artificial intelligence experts are building the world’s angriest robot. Should you be scared?

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It sounds like the beginning of an apocalyptic sci-fi film. A New Zealand artificial intelligence company is building the angriest robot in the world in the hopes of helping companies to understand and placate angry customers. The technology firm, Touchpoint group, has spent more than £230,000 on the project, and is expected to be live by the end of the year.

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Computer scientists are far more likely to make an error with emotionless robots, which they might be less wary of, than robots that exhibit anger. “If we can create genuine anger as an emotion in robots, everything in our background tells us that this is dangerous and this is not something that should be placed in a position of power,” says Dr Armstrong.

And programmers with sinister intentions would intentionally avoid angry robots. “If you want to cause harm, create a murderous robot but don’t make it angry. If you want to cause harm then creating the thing that signals danger to all humans is exactly what you want to avoid,” says Dr Armstrong.

Instead, robots that have no human evidence of emotion could (hypothetically, far in the future) create a far greater threat. Dr Armstrong says:

Quote Everything in our evolutionary background prepares us to deal with angry entities and knowing how to deal with them and whether or not to trust them. If we get a robot that’s angry in the classically human sense, we know so much more about how to deal with it then a robot that does not exhibit anger of any sort but may have goals that are very dangerous. The dangerous ones are the ones that do not correspond to anything that we can classify on a human scale – the ones that are indifferent to some crucial aspect of the world. If AI are indifferent to humans, it’s obvious how that could go wrong. If they’re indifferent to some aspect of humans and they get great power, well that aspect of humanity may vanish.

Quantum computers exploit the bizarre quantum-mechanical properties of atoms and other building blocks of the cosmos. At itse very smallest scale, the universe becomes a fuzzy, surreal place—objects can seemingly exist in more than one place at once or spin in opposite directions at the same time.

D-Wave systems fridgeKeep cool: This system cools parts of D-Wave’s computer to 20 millikelvin.While regular computers symbolize data in bits, 1s and 0s expressed by flicking tiny switch-like transistors on or off, quantum computers use quantum bits, or qubits, that can essentially be both on and off, enabling them to carry out two or more calculations simultaneously. In principle, quantum computers could prove extraordinarily much faster than normal computers for certain problems because they can run through every possible combination at once. In fact, a quantum computer with 300 qubits could run more calculations in an instant than there are atoms in the universe.

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The only people in the world, it seems, who believe in conspiracy theory, are those of us that have studied it. Pat Shannon